skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anecdotally, this seems to be a serious hinderance in the American primary and secondary systems: student sees a setback and deduces he simply isn't "smart enough to study math" and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy through the mechanisms described in this article. Obviously mathematics and heavily mathematical sciences _are_ very much cognitively demanding, but the students arriving to this conclusion aren't usually studying the kind of math that's beyond the limits of an average college bound students: in other words, "not being good at math" is valid reason to drop abstract algebra or complex analysis during the junior year of college, but it's not a reason to accept a C in high school[1] algebra, declare yourself "bad at math", and then choose a major that involves very little math (even if excludes subject fields they're truly passionate about and excel at).

AP Calculus and AP Physics were the most dreaded classes in high school and students were discouraged to take them. I did take AP Calculus (for obvious reasons I was already familiar with functions that take other functions as parameters and return yet other functions) but I followed conventional wisdom and held-off on AP Physics.

Oddly, however, when I got to college I got better grades in _more difficult_ calculus classes (multivariate, vector calculus, differential equations) in college and did well in Physics (which was meant to serve as a "weed-out" class, i.e., forced-curved such that at least 25-50% would fail). I think the psychology had much to do with this: this is a freshman class full of people, why _shouldn't_ I master this material?

I wonder what would happen if instead high school students were told "these are the very basics of modern physics and mathematics and every technical major or minor -- at colleges that are far less selective than where many of you are headed -- is expected to pass them."

[1] When I came to the US in seventh grade from former USSR (where I was already studying algebra, geometry, physics and chemistry at the time) I had a math "placement test" tossed me the first day without any warning and scored two points below the threshold to place me into a "pre-Algebra class" that would merely qualify me for the privilege of studying algebra in 8th grade! I had to take a course at a local community college and pass two additional placement tests over the summer vacation to place into 8th grade algebra. It's no wonder that students assume they're "bad at math" given such an environment.
> Who is going to moderate all of this?

Google, Microsoft, Adobe and other stewards have fulltime technical writers working on new content and reviewing incoming contributed content.
I agree that there is plenty of room for improvement, but you can't launch a rocket with commercial jet engines.

I don't know if it makes sense to normalize for thrust or not, but it seems like thrust should be included somehow.
Am I correct in thinking that previous rocket designs don't have any redundancy built in? This seems like a big improvement in reliability but I'm not super familiar with other rocket designs.
First thought: this might actually make sense on tablets.

Totally doesn't work on my iPad.
New Angry Birds Star Wars game coming soon to Windows 8
SoundCloud logo made with CSS
As we converge on a handful of major email providers, are we really much better off? Would you be singing the same song of Hotmail a decade ago, or is it just because Google seems to be the Monopoly with a Heart of Gold?
If you're using the set of integers, then [1,9) is equivalent to [1,8]; and that would have a different answer from 5 for "what the center is"; so, it does affect the answer.
We had no faces on the homepage when we started. Usertests showed that people were unsure who will fulfill the tasks and therefore didn't want to give us their money. At the moment we show some faces and some tasks which may be even more confusing.

Sorry for the social media verification thingy. It works for most people and so we choose to start from there. We will look into alternatives in the future.

Thanks! If I can help you with anything let me know.
Also a conscious decision: A nice marketplace needs a definition of the goods are, otherwise it's better to come up with a listing type business (here are some contractors, here are some job, match and do whatever you want).

By trying the editor route (which came out of the "i want spreadsheets/ no, i want text documents/ no i want slides" customer development) we hope that people over time will grasp the value of "tangible / trade-able" goods. Even if this means excluding a good chunk of business that can't be standardized.
>> Yes, and it is not science.

> Strawman.

You need to look up the term "straw man." My mentioning that the source you quote is not science is not a straw man, because that's the topic under discussion.

> Your understanding of human behaviour is facile.

Straw man. The topic of discussion is not human behavior, but whether or not psychology is a science. Or have you forgotten?

> There is not stronger form of argument, please don't pretend to lecture.

To someone who doesn't understand science, but who presumes to pontificate on the topic? One who thinks a philosophy textbook is science?

> The fact that you think Academics hold a superior position to actual killers

What the fuck are you taking about? You locate where I ever said or implied this, anywhere, and do it now. I happen to hold the opposite view, but very clearly, evidence is not a matter of concern to you.

> The author of that book is one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet on that subject.

And Hemingway is an authority on bullfighting -- but that doesn't make his books scientific.

Honest to God. I give up -- your ignorance is too profound.
Its my big bug-bear when developing ARM embedded systems, having to re-learn and re-code libraries every time the chip changes. Just look at the guys struggling with the low level stuff on the Raspberry Pi

A low level BIOS flashed into the chip would be an absolutely awesome outcome for the embedded crowd.
thanks for sharing this article, i cosntantly felt threatened and suffered lack of condifence growing up and my performances were often affected by "conditional stupidity"
I say the whole dichotomy between the day-to-day vocabulary and technical/scientific vocabularies should be dropped altogether. This dichotomy is responsible for the cliquey attitude of scientists on one end; the treatment of sciences as esoteric by the laymen on the other end; the labelling of science enthusiasts as "hipsters"; etc. All of which is ridiculous.

Today, the life conditions of the layman are given by modern sciences, but he insists in using an antiquated vocabulary in speaking about his experiences and the world. Hence some people strongly feel in terms of "computer wizard" instead of "computer literate"; "static matter" instead of "processes"; etc. We really should stop divorcing sciences from our day-to-day life, vocabularies and feelings; it's unnatural what is going on. We look like cavemen with mobile phones, and more than half a century after the formulation of cybernetics, our daily epistemologies are still largely Aristotelian!

So a well written scientific article for the general public would avoid translating the scientific discoveries into the antiquated terms. "Quantum ether"? What a heroic way to crap on the enormous shift from Newton's "fundamental emptiness" to Einstein's "fundamental plenum". Similarly for CS articles, careless translations should be avoided; instead, we should borrow in our common speaking as much as possible from scientific vocabularies, and make those terms fundamental: they serve and represent us much, much better, because they package the most up-to-date results of our enquires into the structure of the world.

Sciences give us factors of sanity, let's not waste them.

Edit: cosmetics.
My guess is that if you achieve sustainable output beyond breakeven then it's a more reasonable engineering challenge to scale that up. The key here being sustainable, none of these technologies are too close to that yet it seems.
While we are on the topic, the much anticipated Python for Data Analysis (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023784.do) is supposed to come out this month. I'm wondering if anyone here has tried the early release and what are your thoughts?
I really chuckled at this. It almost reads like a disinformation campaign.
"Move fast and break things" is about moving fast, and only mentions "break things" to indicate that its OK to break things. I agree that what the code does is orthogonal.

I would carve out space shuttles, etc, as different, but they already are carved out: they use special subsets of C with no memory allocation, run extensive static analysis and proof software, because those things literally cannot go wrong.

Anything that doesn't use that sort of thing has already committed to the idea that it won't be foolproof. If you code in a scripting language, you are already writing software which you implicitly acknowledge can go wrong. Software has bugs!
Yup, embarrassing indeed in some places, wip, but not yet easy to simply extract all current data to easily hand it to someone.

Thanks for pushing it up the "damn,we gotta take more care of that" list.
I am not sure I get what you want to say. We should do these three things or we are doing them?
Cisco cuts ties to China's ZTE after Iran probe
Startup School Afterparty Hosted by Weebly and Dropbox
Well, I suck.
Have you thought of approaching someone else at your work if side projects are allowed? Add me to the list of interested but not quite sure what it is, if you're looking for a hand, let me know - contact details in profile - just finished an MVP for a client and about to start another.
Since when is non-existence a cause? I think you need to re-phrase this a bit. The simultaneity of non-existence is precisely not a cause. The fact that they are independent (statistically) is perhaps more interesting. Certainly from a public policy perspective.
I'm wondering how this will effect Mozilla since they are planning on releasing a phone with ZTE. Not going to be good to market to corporate users if this is true.
This doesn't seem to be working for me in the latest Firefox.
There is a psychological test sometimes alleged to detect hidden stereotyping called the 'Implicit Association Test' (IAT):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_Association_Test

The usual interpretation of the IAT is that delays or errors in associating certain categories with positive/negative traits indicates hidden bias. But if a stereotype threat effect is also present when taking the IAT, then delays/errors may be arising from a (self-fulfilling) fear of confirming negative stereotypes about bias, moreso than any actual bias.

Since the IAT is often introduced as a way to detect subtle and stigmatized biases, test-takers are explicitly primed to worry about stereotypes-about-stereotyping. In this kind of use, the IAT might thus be more like a "push poll" (or a Scientologist's 'E-meter'), designed to create effects in the test-taker, than an objective measure of unprimed attitudes.
Your post is largely a straw man and contains snark that certainly does not raise the level of this conversation.

I'm talking about passion for programming. I'm not "claiming to own the definition of passion," I'm saying that passion for programming manifests in knowing the answers to questions like Colin's. It simply does.
I'm pretty sure thats the way its designed. I think its supposed to stick at the clip like a real piece of paper would at an actual paper clip.
"A lot of math teaching is terrible, full of teaching formulas and abstract concepts, instead of the why's and how those abstract concepts relate to real life."

Well, I think your terrible description shows how the situation is more like "teaching math is hard".

One thing about math is that once you get it seems easy and so it's easy to assume the teach who failed to teach you before this was doing it wrong. The problem is different students fall off the wagon at different points. Too much abstraction? Too little abstract? Not enough "real world applications", too many "real world applications" (the horrid "word problems" etc).

I'll give you that one-to-one teaching is especially useful since there are so many ways to misunderstand maths.
Some good content here, but the rails specific stuff feels out of place on a site that purports to be focusing on the frontend. I'd consider either making it backend agnostic, or rebrand the site as Better Frontend for Rails developers.
Ask HN: Best technical recruiters in SF Bay Area?
Who are the best technical recruiters in the SF Bay Area? Specifically for junior devs.

Mirror Placement (http://mirrorplacement.com/) looks good, as does Lab8 Ventures (http://www.lab8ventures.com/). Any experience with these?
This isn't the worst possible problem. Engines can fail in a far more catastrophic fashion. If the surrounding engines and superstructure had been damaged things wouldn't have turned out so well.
I vaguely remember a reading a similar article that was a lot longer.
Google Updates October 2012: The truth behind GPlus Votes
I particularly liked this passage from Wirth's essay:

A notorious example for a bad idea was the choice of the equal sign to denote assignment. It goes back to Fortran in 1957 and has blindly been copied by armies of language designers. Why is it a bad idea? Because it overthrows a century old tradition to let "=" denote a comparison for equality, a predicate which is either true or false. But Fortran made it to mean assignment, the enforcing of equality. In this case, the operands are on unequal footing: The left operand (a variable) is to be made equal to the right operand (an expression). x = y does not mean the same thing as y = x. Algol corrected this mistake by the simple solution: Let assignment be denoted by ":=".

Perhaps this may appear as nitpicking to programmers who got used to the equal sign meaning assignment. But mixing up assignment and comparison is a truly bad idea, because it requires that another symbol be used for what traditionally was expressed by the equal sign. Comparison for equality became denoted by the two characters "==" (first in C). This is a consequence of the ugly kind, and it gave rise to similar bad ideas using "++", "--", "&&" etc."

I agree with this, and have never understood why languages perpetuate this practice of using the equal sign to denote something other than its meaning in mathematics.
When should someone quit and try a different route vs persist with one approach?
I've seen very successful people adopt both strategies. Can anyone share their experiences? Thanks
"Illegal showroom"? What kind of nonsense is this?
Ask HN: How does seating to Startup School work?
I understand that investors/VIP will probably get the front seats, but after that how does seating work? It is on a first come first serve (i.e. star wars movie release bring your tent style) or is there some sort of pre-arranged seating?
Or 'THE Web Developer'
Love the idea for the site, and though it may be ahead of its time, it is an ambitious project and deserves to do well - one day a lot of work will be distributed this way.

However using txtspk like pls for talking to potential customers is not quicker or cool - it shows a lack of respect. Also, this error from zephyr has been on your home page for the last few hours:

Obvisously you want to keep your site and app secure, but who is really good at this? Zephyr comes from MIT and is the perfect interface to the Noisebridge community.

Simple spelling and grammatical errors on your site home like this will cost you credibility and customers; best just to fix them and move on. Your initial text, by you and your users, will set the tone for everything that follows.
WebGL: How It Works
Google's Tablet App Quality Checklist
I wrote an article about this a month ago http://lucahammer.com/post/31269937454/startup-wording

I know that we have that problem and we try to solve it. I believe that discussions like this one help with it. We try to describe what we offer and others tell us what they don't understand.

We remove overhead from outsourcing. You define what results you need and the people on the platform deliver. No management needed. (Sounds like more bullshit? work.io takes care about who fulfills your tasks so you don't need to.)
> or you need to follow the rules (i.e. no trusts owning an account) that you agreed to when you signed up.

No. Not when you signed up.

It's anytime they decide to change the contract. They modify the contract whenever they want to, without any regard for continuity or business viability ... and if you don't agree, they disable the account. Maybe keep some of your funds too.

Is it legal? Gray area. Some courts don't enforce contracts of adhesion strenuously.

Is it ethical? No.

You treat your business partners with respect and don't change the contract whenever you feel like it, to their detriment, simply because you can.

It's abusive.
Because the nature of inflation is to devalue money. For example, let's say you put $10k under your bed to buy a car for your kid when they turn 18, and let's say inflation was at 2% for those 18 years.

Now the 18 years have speed buy and you go grab your very old stack of $10k from under the bed frame to celebrate your kid leaving the house. When you get to the car dealership, you find the equivalent car you could have purchased now costs $14,282. Your money has lost almost a third of it's value just by inflation.
Wow, fusion power in less than 15 years! Gee whiz!

Actually, the 15 years out time frame puts it beyond what I've expected, 10 years out. That's where fusion has been for most of my life, 10 years from now.
> Am I correct in thinking that previous rocket designs don't have any redundancy built in?

The answer depends on specifics. The NASA Space Shuttle was able to reach orbit after the failure of one of its three engines, but only if the payload and/or altitude weren't near their range extremes. In other circumstances, the timing of the failure might determine whether the mission could proceed.

When I worked on the Shuttle, one design guideline was that no single-point failure modes should be allowed if it was possible to avoid them. Obviously this guideline was frequently not met. A one-word summary describing the avoidance of single-point failure modes is "redundancy".
Higher resolution image capture for applications dealing with face recognition would be awesome. Is the team holding off on face recognition until a higher resolution camera/kinect is in place?
"What this means is that you should be investing just as heavily in growth-related activities as in product-related ones. We’re suggesting about half your time should be spent on traction, and half on product."

What should I spend the other 40% of my time on?
The fundraiser raised funds. Success.
Dan Arielly's "Predictably Irrational" (http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expande...) is a great book that covers such phenomenon.
Interesting, and nice design.

I'd like to be able to add my github and behance.net profiles as well if I can. Those would reflect my skills a lot better than would my facebook.

Also I don't really like that my username seems linked to whatever my email address was -- I should be able to display my real name, and if I can change that I haven't found where yet.

What is the user ID for and why is it listed in my profile?

I would like to know a bit more about how you're handling payment, and dealing with conflict and arbitration. Can I connect my paypal account? Is there some kind of escrow thing like elance uses?
Already corrected.
No matter how many powers balance, if humans are able to move from government to private sector, regulatory capture will happen. How can a system prevent that?
LinkedIn Hackday, Berlin, October 19 - 20
1) Loop versioning. You can check if the pointers are aligned, and then decide whether you want to take the fast path or the slow path. (A better example would be aliasing. Because pointers don't carry the size of the region they point to, we can't check if two pointers alas. Restrict solves this problem with programmer intervention.). I believe that GCC's vectorization code already does this sort of versioning.

Example:

testl $0xf,%ptr
jz aligned_path // in reality, fast path would be inlined here for cache locality reasons.
jnz aligned_slow_path

2) If your reads are naturally aligned, you will never be able to read a word that starts on one page and ends on another, so working in naturally the largest naturally aligned chunks you can is valid. This is a non-problem. (In fact, glibc takes advantage of this in it's assembly implementations of various SSE string functions.)
Almost 2 years ago I worked on a project to create a real-time avatar of Air New Zealand's Airpoints Fairy. Used a Kinect to do live tracking of an actress who interacted directly with audiences (via video and audio hookups). She co-hosted an awards show and a big rugby tournament.

The Kinect worked amazingly well but head tracking was a little iffy. So we strapped a smart-phone to the actress's head and used it's compass/gyroscopes to provide fine head tracking :)

There is isn't a lot of footage on the web but check out: http://theflyingsocialnetwork.com/archives/1545
Supporters of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange ordered to pay his bail
The focus of this experiment isn't so much proposing new UX that we think should be adopted. More so, this experiment is to showcase what is now possible using the newest HTML5 features - to provide inspiration for those trying to implement novel HTML5 animations. A page flip allowed us to show off some of my favorite new HTML5 effects.
Great. Now take that and explain it like i'm 5. Then put that on your website.
To be clear, are you proposing the SEC be incentivized to imprison innocents to boost conviction rates, or be incentivized to ignore criminals to surpress corruption rates?
Behind the speed: Basecamp mobile
Ah, sorry. I've taken a logic class, so I should really stop making spurious arguments like that. We have seen the enemy and he is us and all of that I guess.

I'll admit to collecting domain names simply because they sound cool and I worry other people will snatch them up.
shouldn't that be 'Why PayPal No Longer Accepts Us'?
everybody interested in why rocket engines have the amazing ability to turn thrust into fireworks when least expected should read this excellent book on rocket propellant history: http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf. to spark your interest, foreword was written by isaac asimov.
Sportsmen & sportswomen on Twitter - let them be heard loud and clear
If this isn't the ethos of everything Apple I don't know what is: other people have to support Apple. Apple just can't do anything standard or play along nicely with everyone else.

Spoiled brats we used to call them in school.
John Gurdon (2012 Nobel Prize): "dont tell schoolchildren what they're good at"
What we miss in iOS 6: Ars reader edition
California has been serving cease-and-desist letters to ride-sharing startups
> things that the US should actually value, such as a free market

The problem is that countries like China disrupt the free market in ways that are hard to combat -- currency games and subsidies for its own industries, for example.

But the main problem is simple and obvious: As long as we have things like a high minimum wage, environmental regulations, safety regulations, etc., we will be at a disadvantage against countries that don't.

If you've ever played any complex-economy strategy games (Dwarf Fortress, Settlers of Catan, Colonization, Imperialism, and Victoria come to mind), the common theme I've found is that being self-sufficient makes you very powerful.

My conclusion: There's nothing wrong with protectionism, and our pro-globalization economic policies since the 1970's have simply been wrongheaded.
Thanks for the link Rory, I had to go searching a little deeper to actually find an image of the Falcon 9 Air. Pretty cool: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/12/pictures-and-information-fr...
Forms are a problem worth solving